Linked Documents

When you are developing elements in your model, you might want to provide extensive documentation on an element, to provide more structured text than you can create in the element 'Notes' field. In this case, you can create a formatted document that is linked to the element. You can create a linked document from scratch, or from one of a range of Linked Document Templates that you define with the Linked Document Template Editor. The linked documents are held within the model.

Working with Linked Documents

Task

Detail

See also

Create linked documents

You can create a linked document either:

Within a Document Artifact element attached to your model element, or

Directly on the UML element

The advantages of using a Document Artifact to host the linked document include:

Visibility of the Document Artifact and hence linked document in the Project Browser

As you can only have one linked document in an element, hosting each of several documents in its own Document Artifact and connecting the several Document Artifacts to one model element means that you have broader scope for providing information

Similarly, associating several elements with one document by connecting them to the host Document Artifact element means that you can share information rather than duplicating it

The advantages of using a linked document directly on an element include:

More tightly binding the content of the document to the element, so there is less ambiguity in what the information refers to

More tightly binding the document itself to the element, so there is less risk of the document being changed, moved or deleted without reference to the element it belongs to

Linked documents are intimately associated with specific elements, but you can also create hyperlinks in the document directly to other elements in the model. Having followed the link, you can perform any normal operation on that element.

You can create a Document Artifact element to contain a linked document in all editions of Enterprise Architect

You can create and link a document to any UML element in the model, in the Professional, Corporate, Business and Software Engineering, Systems Engineering and Ultimate editions of Enterprise Architect

You can work on linked documents through the Automation Interface, using the methods GetLinkedDocument(), DeleteLinkedDocument(), SaveLinkedDocument(string Filename) and LoadLinkedDocument(string Filename)